The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907

7. The Socialist-Revolutionaries

Thespeeches of the Socialist-Revolutionary intellectuals
(we dealt with the S.R. peasants above when dealing with the Trudoviks) are
full of the same scathing criticism of the Cadets and bitter enmity towards
the landlords. Not to repeat what we have said above, we shall merely point
out anewfeature that this group of deputies possesses. Unlike
the Popular Socialists who, instead of the ideal of socialism, are
inclined to paint the ideal of ... Denmark, and unlike the peasants, who
are strangers to all doctrine and directly express the sentiments of the
oppressed person who just as directly idealises emancipation from the
existing form of exploitation, the Socialist-Revolutionaries introduce into
their speeches the doctrine oftheir own“socialism”. Thus, Uspensky and Sagatelyan (a member of
“Dashnaktsutyun”—which stands very close to the
Socialist-Revolutionaries, and the “young ones” of which even
belong to the S. R. Party) raise the question of thevillage
commune. The latter speaker rather naïvely observes: “it
must be noted with regret that in developing the wide theory of
nationalisation of the land, no special emphasis is laid on the living,
surviving institution, on the basis of which alone progress can be
made.... The safeguard against all these horrors [the horrors of Europe,
the destruction of small farming, etc.] is the Village commune”
(1122).

The“regret” of this worthy knight of the village commune will be
understood if we bear in mind that be was thetwenty-sixthspeaker on
the agrarian question.

Hewas preceded by not less than fourteen Left members; Trudoviks, and others,
and “no special emphasis was laid on the living, surviving
institution” by any one of them!There is reason for “regret” when one sees among the peas ants in
the Duma the same indifference towards the village commune as was displayed by
the congresses of the Peas ant Union. Sagatelyan and Uspensky took up the cause
of the village commune like true sectarians in the midst of the peasant
revolution, which does not want to hear of theoldagrarian
associations. “I sense a certain danger to the village commune,”
mourned Sagatelyan (1123). “Now is just the time at which the village commune
must be saved at all costs” (1124). “This form [i. e., the village
commune] may develop into a world movement, capable of offering a solution to
all economic problems” (1126). Apparently, Mr. Sagatelyan gave vent to all
these arguments about the village commune “sadly and
irrelevantly”. And his colleague Uspensky, criticising Stolypin’s
legislation against the village communes, expressed time desire that “the
mobilisation of landed property be reduced to the utmost limits, to the last
degree” (1115).

ThisNarodnik’s wish is undoubtedly reactionary. Curiously
enough, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, in whose name this wish was
expressed in the Duma, advocates the abolition of private ownership of
land, without realising that this involves theutmostmobilisation
of the land, that it creates the freest and easiest conditions for the laud
to pass from farmer to farmer, the freest and easiest conditions for the
penetration of capital into agriculture! Confusing private ownership of
land with the domination of capital in agriculture is a characteristic
mistake of the bourgeois laud nationalisers (including Henry George, and
many others). In their endeavour to “reduce mobilisation”, the
Socialist—Revolutionaries are at. one with the Cadets, whose
representative Kutler openly stated in his speech: “The Party of
People’s Freedom proposes to limit their [the peasants’] rights only
in respect of alienation and mortgage, i. e., to prevent, in the future,
the wide development of the sale and purchase of land” (12th session,
March 19, 1907, p. 740).

TheCadets link this reactionary aim with methods of solving the agrarian
problem (domination of time landlords and the bureaucracy) that make possible
stupid bureaucratic restrictions and red-tape that will help to enthral the
peasants.The Socialist-Revolutionaries link the reactionary aim with measures that
preclude the possibility of bureaucratic restraints (local land committees
elected on the basis of universal, etc., suffrage). In the case of the
former, what is reactionary is their entire (bureaucratic-landlord) policy
in the bourgeois revolution. In the case of the latter, what is reactionary
is their petty-bourgeois “socialism”, which they mistakenly
want to force upon the consistent bourgeois revolution.

Onthe question of the Socialist-Revolutionaries’ economic theories, it
is interesting to note the arguments of their Duma representatives about
the influence of agrarian reforms upon the development of industry. The
naïve point of view of bourgeois revolutionaries, barely concealed by
a veneer of Narodnik doctrine, stands out very strikingly. Take, for
example, the Socialist-Revolutionary Kabakov (Perm Gubernia), known in the
Urals as the organiser of the Peasant Union, as “the President of the
Alapayevsk

Republic”,[2]and also as

			     “Pugachov”.[1]In the purely peasant manner he bases the peasants’ right to the land on
the grounds, among other things, that the peasants have never refused to
defend Russia against her enemies (1953). “why allot the land?”
he exclaims. “We bluntly declare that the land must be the common
property of the toiling peasantry, and the peasants will be able to divide
the land among themselves in the local areas without the interference of
any government officials, who, we have long known, have never been of any
use to the peasantry” (1954). “In our region, the Urals, entire
factories have come to a stand still because there is no sale for sheet
iron, yet in Russia all the peasants’ huts have straw-thatched roofs. Those
huts should have been roofed with sheet iron long ago.... There is a
market, but there are no buyers. Who constitute the mass of buyers in our
country? The hundred mil lion toiling peasants—that is the foundation
of the mass of buyers” (1952).

Yes,that correctly expresses the conditions for real capitalist production in
the Urals in place of the age-old,semi-feudal stagnation of “possessional”

production.[3]Neither the Stolypin nor the Cadet agrarian policy can
bring about any appreciable improvement in the conditions of life ofthe masses, and unless these conditions are improved, really
“free” industry will not develop in the Urals. Only a peasant
revolution could quickly transform wooden Russia into iron Russia. The
Socialist-Revolutionary peasant has a truer and broader conception of the
conditions necessary for the development of capitalism than have the sworn
servants of capital.

AnotherSocialist-Revolutionary, the peasant Khvorostukhin (Saratov Gubernia),
said: “Yes, gentlemen, of course, many spokesmen of the Party of
People’s Freedom have accused the Trudovik Group of wanting to transfer
the land to those who wish to till it. They say that then a lot of people will
leave the towns, and this will make things worse. But I think, gentlemen, that
only those who have nothing to do will leave the towns, but those who have work
are used to work, and since they have work they will not leave the
towns. Indeed, why should land be given to those who do not want to cultivate
it?”... (774.) Is it not obvious that this “S.R.” does not in the
least want universal, equalised land tenure, but the creation of free and equal
farming on free land?... “It is necessary, at all costs, to release
economic freedom for the whole people, particularly for the people who have
suffered and starved for so many years” (777).

Donot think that thiscorrectformulation of therealcontent of S.R.-ism (“release economic freedom”)
is dueonlyto the clumsy, peasant way of expression. It is more
than that. The S.R. leader Mushenko, an intellectual, who replied to the
debate on the agrarian question on be half of the Socialist-Revolutionary
Party, was far more naïve in expressing his economic views than the
peasants Kabakov and Khvorostukhin.

“Wesay,” declared Mushenko, “that proper
   resettlement, proper dispersion, will be possible only when the land is
   unfenced, when all the barriers erected by the principle of private
   ownership of the land are removed. Further, the Minister spoke about the
   increase in the population of our country.... It turned out that for this
   increase alone [1,600,000] about 3,500,000 dessiatins of land will be
   needed. He says: Thus, if you have equalised the land, where will you get
   landfor such an increase in the population? But I ask: Where, in what state
   [sic!] is the whole increase in the population absorbed, in
   agriculture?The law that regulates the distribution of the population
   according to social-estates, according to occupations, operates In the
   reverse direction[our italics]. If a state, if a country is not
   degenerating, but is developing industrially, it shows that on the
   foundation of agriculture, which is satisfying the elementary needs in food
   and raw materials, more and more economic storeys are being erected. Demand
   grows, new industrial products appear, new branches of industry spring up;
   the manufacturing industry ,attracts larger and larger numbers of
   workers. The urban population grows faster than the agricultural and
   absorbs the major pan of the population increase. It sometimes happens,
   gentlemen, that the agricultural population diminishes not only relatively,
   but even absolutely. If this [!] process is slow in our country, it, is
   because there is nothing on which to build those new economic
   storeys. Peasant economy is too shaky a foundation; the market for industry
   is too small. Create a healthy, numerous, and vigorous agricultural
   population by potting the land at the disposal of the people, and you will
   see what a demand there will be for industrial products, and what a mass of
   workers will be needed for the factories and mills, in the towns”
   (1173),

“Wesay,” declared Mushenko, “that proper
   resettlement, proper dispersion, will be possible only when the land is
   unfenced, when all the barriers erected by the principle of private
   ownership of the land are removed. Further, the Minister spoke about the
   increase in the population of our country.... It turned out that for this
   increase alone [1,600,000] about 3,500,000 dessiatins of land will be
   needed. He says: Thus, if you have equalised the land, where will you get
   landfor such an increase in the population? But I ask: Where, in what state
   [sic!] is the whole increase in the population absorbed, in
   agriculture?The law that regulates the distribution of the population
   according to social-estates, according to occupations, operates In the
   reverse direction[our italics]. If a state, if a country is not
   degenerating, but is developing industrially, it shows that on the
   foundation of agriculture, which is satisfying the elementary needs in food
   and raw materials, more and more economic storeys are being erected. Demand
   grows, new industrial products appear, new branches of industry spring up;
   the manufacturing industry ,attracts larger and larger numbers of
   workers. The urban population grows faster than the agricultural and
   absorbs the major pan of the population increase. It sometimes happens,
   gentlemen, that the agricultural population diminishes not only relatively,
   but even absolutely. If this [!] process is slow in our country, it, is
   because there is nothing on which to build those new economic
   storeys. Peasant economy is too shaky a foundation; the market for industry
   is too small. Create a healthy, numerous, and vigorous agricultural
   population by potting the land at the disposal of the people, and you will
   see what a demand there will be for industrial products, and what a mass of
   workers will be needed for the factories and mills, in the towns”
   (1173),

Now,isn’t he delightful, this
“Socialist-Revolutionary” who calls the programme for the
development of capitalism a programme for the socialisation of the land? He
has no inkling that the law of the more rapid increase in the urban
population is exclusively a law of thecapitalistmode of
production. It never occurs to him that this “law” does not and
cannot operate otherwise than through the disintegration of the peasantry
into a bourgeoisie and a proletariat, through the “sorting out”
among the cultivators, i. e., the ousting of the “pauper” by
the “real farmer”. The economic harmony which this S.R. depicts
on the basis of a capitalist law is pathetically naïve. But it is not
the harmony preached by the vulgar bourgeois economist who wants to conceal
the struggle between labour and capital. It is the harmony of the
unconscious bourgeois revolutionary who wants to make a clean sweep of the
survivals of autocracy, serfdom, medievalism.

Thevictoriousbourgeois revolution of which our present agrarian
programme dreams cannot proceed except by means ofsucha bourgeois
revolutionary. And the class-conscious worker mustsupport himfor the
sake of social development, without allowing himself for a moment to be taken
in by the childish prattle of the Narodnik “economists”

[1]SeeList of Members of the Second State Duma, privately
published by an anonymous author, St. Petersburg, 1907.  —Lenin

[2]AlapayevskRepublic—the name which tsarist officials
gave to the Alapayevsk Volost in the Verkhnyaya Tura Uyezd, Perm Gubernia.
G. I. Kabakov, the Socialist-Revolutionary peasant deputy in the Second
Duma whom Lenin mentions, succeeded in organising a Peasant Union in the
Alapayevsk Volost in 1905 with as many as 30,000 members.

[3]Possessionalproduction—industrial enterprises based on
the exploitation of possessional peasants. This category of peasants was
introduced by Peter the Great (1721), who allowed serf peasants to be
bought for work at the manufactories. These serfs were attached to the
enterprise and could not be sold apart from the manufactory.

Possessionalownership was abolished in 1863 following the abolition of
serfdom in 1861.